Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s critics say they know that despite the Justice Department’s scathing report on bias in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Joe Arpaio is not going down without a fight.
In a conference call with reporters on Friday, Arizona officials and leaders of the movement to oust Arpaio praised the DOJ report, but said that there is still a lot of work to be done to get rid of the Sheriff.
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said that the findings “validated what people have been saying and criticizing for years with regard to Arpaio.” But Grijalva also referenced a press conference Arpaio gave on Thursday in which he called the report a “witch hunt” and said it was politically motivated. Grijalva said that this “defiance” indicates how Arpaio will respond to calls for his resignation, and though “I think that all of us collectively and individually need to continue to put pressure on [Arpaio] to resign, I think he’s not going to do it.”
But, Grijalva said, “this is an advantage that we’ve been waiting for, to finally deal with some real facts, to finally deal with the fact that Arpaio is an aberration to the rule of law. We have an opportunity.”
Mary Rose Wilcox, the Maricopa County Supervisor, described how “a civil rights crisis was created in Maricopa County by Joe Arpaio.” She pointed to one line in particular in the report that sums it all up: Arpaio “treated all Latinos as if they were undocumented.”
“He will be defiant, he will say I’m the toughest sheriff, I don’t have to do this,” Wilcox said, but “we will have to be very vigilant.”
Randy Parraz of Citizens for a Better Arizona, the group behind the successful ouster of Senate president Russell Pearce (R) last month, said it is “such a breath of fresh air to see the Department of Justice come out with these findings.”
“The reason we’re going to continue to call for his resignation is because this is a top law enforcement official in Maricopa County who has now been found by the Department of Justice to have violated the law,” Parraz said. Arpaio “is no longer fit to be the top law enforcement officer in this county. We can’t wait another year for another election.”
“He needs to resign, he needs to resign now,” Parraz added.
Salvador Reza, a civil rights Leader in Phoenix, said that he’d “like to caution that it’s not over.”
“The longer that Mr. Arpaio is not under a receivership, the longer Arpaio is not indicted,” Reza said, “the longer that this will continue to be a political football arena.”
“There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said.
Arturo Venegas, the Director of the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative, said that “the reality is that racial profiling and aggressive tactics that the sheriff has long championed are still occurring” in other states, and so he “would hope that this becomes truly a wake up call.”
He added that he was “disturbed as I also watched the sheriff’s comments” on the DOJ’s report, and “it was obvious that he was defiant.”
